I ask, only because our prestigious (I’m told) and extremely popular (I’m guessing) actress neighbor Rachel Bilson has an ornamental Japanese fruit tree in her front yard that overhangs the sidewalk.

Every April, the tree is a prodigious producer of yellowy, rubbery fruit called loquats, most of which drop to the ground, turn bad, and get squished. So, as a public service to keep the street clean, when my partner and I go for our evening stroll, he will usually reach up, pick a couple, and eat them – while I walk ahead in a jaunty manner, whistling, and trying to pretend nothing illicit is going on behind me, just as I do when he decides he needs to pee urgently and rushes off into someone’s garden.

Anyway, in the event of a court-case, let it be known that I neither approve of stealing, nor participate in it. Not for reasons of conscience, but because I happen not to like loquats.

My lawyer would say no. And if he didn’t say no, I’d fire him and get another. Here’s why.

Being in movies, Bilson – who is marrying Hayden Christensen, for reasons not obvious to the rest of us – struts the public stage. In that sense she is the property of us, her adoring (and in one particular case slightly puzzled as to who she is or what she’s done) fans.

Now extend that idea. If she’s going to let fruit hang down outside her home into a public area, doesn’t that kinda make that fruit ours in the same way?

My replacement lawyer, if he knows what’s good for him, would say yes.

Sidebar. Our friends used to own Bilson’s house. They, in turn, bought it from Noah Wylie, the E.R. actor. According to them, he left the place a real mess. For instance, when he had the kitchen installed, apparently, he didn’t buy regular units like the rest of us would do. Instead – again, according to our friends; this is just a passed-along rumor snippet – he had NBC set-builders come in and construct a kitchen set in his house, one that was so badly done that it had to be ripped out in its entirety and replaced with a real, workable kitchen our friends could actually use.

And before you go rushing off and telling this to people, I am immediately distancing myself from the information. I can’t confirm that it was a TV kitchen set, or that Wylie was the one who installed it. Maybe the owners before him were amateur set-builders and they did it. But I certainly saw the room before our friends did the ripping, and it was pretty crummy.

Anyway, my point is, the loquat tree used to belong to Noah Wylie, then to our friends, and that’s when we started taking fruit off it. So, in a sense, we’re really just carrying on that same sacred tradition with La Bilson, right? I mean, every tradition has to start somewhere.

At the very least, R.B. should consider this a pay-off for the massive weirdness and inconvenience she’s causing by being popular.

I say this because in recent weeks the paparazzi have resurfaced in the street. Damn, it’s so annoying. Creepy little weaselly foreign-looking men in unmarked cars hog the curb for hours and hours and hours on end each day, waiting for her to emerge, hoping they can grab a couple of snaps of her walking, or staring up at her loquat tree, wondering where all the fruit’s gone, and sell them to TMZ and Entertainment Tonight.

Walking by yesterday, I could tell she wasn’t even there. Her truck had gone, the place was empty. Yet still they sat and waited and watched. It’s very unnerving.

I wanted to go up to them and yell, “Get a life!” Or at least take a photo of them for a change and post it on here for you; teach them a lesson. But I thought they might see me and beat the crap out of me. These little thugs are like a sissy mafia; they’re very temperamental.

Worse still, we have to make sure they’re not out there with their cameras when we pass the loquat tree. To take fruit under cover of darkness is one thing. To have it appear on the front page of The Enquirer next week is another.